Santayana rolls in his grave

Way back in college, when I was studying Japan and China and their histories after contact with the West, I recall my professor pointing out the tiny flaw in the mercantile reasoning that had every New England merchant thinking that if he could just sell one shirt to every Chinaman, he could retire a rich man.
The flaw was that 99.9% of those Chinamen didn’t have any money to buy their ratty shirts.
Comes now GM apparently thinking along the same lines.
In the old days, GM would never have wasted the time and money on this, because they knew that the Chinese people’s “prosperity” is an illusion.
If it weren’t for China lending us fiat money for which they then collect our fiat money as interest and as income from their slave labor factories, my guess is that their economy would bottom out. It’s no wonder they keep lending us money — they have no choice. If we go bust, they go bust right along with us.
It’s all a grand illusion. They’re as caught up in our economic problems as much as we are. Somehow I doubt that’s what they thought would happen when they came up with the plan to get us so far in debt that we’d have to capitulate.
The difference is that we’ll probably work our way out of the mess we’ve made. They’ll just slip back into peasantry.